Sinaloa Cartel

The Sinaloa Cartel, often described as the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Western Hemisphere, is an alliance of some of Mexico’s top capos. The coalition’s members operate in concert to protect themselves, relying on connections at the highest levels and corrupting portions of the federal police and military to maintain the upper hand against rivals.

History

The state of Sinaloa has long been a center for contraband in Mexico, as well as a home for marijuana and poppy cultivation. Nearly all of the trafficking organizations in Mexico have their origins in the region. They were, in essence, a small group of farming families that lived in rural parts of the state. In the 1960s and 1970s, they moved from the contraband trade into drugs, particularly marijuana. One of the first to traffic marijuana in bulk was Pedro Aviles, who later brought his friend’s son, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” into the business.

Aviles was killed in a shootout with police in 1978. In the latter part of the 1970s, the various families branched into moving cocaine for Colombian and Central American traffickers, and shifted their operations to Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco. Their leaders included Rafael Caro Quintero, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Working closely with the Honduran Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, the men came into contact with Colombia’s Medellín Cartel. Matta Ballesteros lived part-time in Colombia, where he operated as the main intermediary between Mexican and Colombian traffickers, particularly the Medellín and Guadalajara Cartels. They established the patterns that we see repeated today: movement of bulk shipments of cocaine via airplane and boat to Central America and Mexico, then by land routes into the United States. The boldness of the Mexican traffickers became evident when they murdered undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena in 1985.

Sinaloa Cartel Factbox

Founded
Mid-1980s

Membership
Operatives in 17 Mexican states and as many as 50 countries

The death of Camarena was the beginning of the end of the Guadalajara Cartel. US pressure forced Mexican authorities to act, and the leaders of the cartel fled. The remaining factions established bases in various parts of Mexico. The Arellano Félix brothers set up camp in Tijuana. The Carrillo Fuentes family moved to Juarez. El Chapo and his partner, Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, remained in the Sinaloa area.

The battles between these organizations began almost immediately. In November 1992, El Chapo sent 40 gunmen to raid a Tijuana Cartel party in Puerto Vallarta, killing nine people. The Tijuana Cartel responded by trying to assassinate El Chapo at the Guadalajara airport in 1993, killing a Mexican cardinal instead. El Chapo fled to Guatemala where he was arrested two weeks later. Palma Salazar was arrested in 1995.

The operations remained under the auspices of El Chapo’s brother Arturo Loera, Ramon Laija Serrano, and Hector, Alfredo and Arturo Beltran Leyva. El Chapo maintained some control from prison, passing messages through his lawyers. In 2001, he escaped prison, and assumed a central leadership role in the organization. Chapo was famously recaptured, then escaped from prison, then recaptured in Mexico once again in 2016, only adding to his criminal legend.

In January 2017, El Chapo was extradited to the United States. His recapture and extradition has sparked a wave of violence due to internal power struggles within the Sinaloa Cartel and efforts from other criminal groups to expand their operations in the capo’s absence.

Leadership

After the breakaway of the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) in 2008, El Chapo became the most visible head of the Sinaloa Cartel, although he was joined at the top table by Ismael Zambada Garcia, alias “El Mayo,” and Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno, alias “El Azul.” El Azul reportedly died of a heart attack in June 2014, although there are rumors that he is still alive and well.

The Sinaloa Cartel is not a hierarchical structure. El Chapo, El Azul and El Mayo have all maintained their own separate but cooperating organizations, while the cartel’s operations in foreign countries, and even within Mexico, are often outsourced to local partners.

El Chapo’s capture and later extradition to the United States appears to have sparked an internal battle for control of the organization, as evidenced by a February 2017 attack against El Mayo and two of El Chapo’s sons that was reportedly orchestrated by El Chapo’s one-time right-hand man, Dámaso López Núñez, alias “Licenciado.”

Geography

The Sinaloa Cartel’s tentacles stretch from New York City to Buenos Aires and almost every major city in between. The cartel was founded in Mexico’s Sinaloa state and now operates in 17 Mexican states, and by some estimates, in as many as 50 countries.

Allies and Enemies

The Sinaloa Cartel’s central bond is blood. Many of its members are related by birth or by marriage. However, the cartel also often acts more like a federation than a tightly knit organization. The core of the group, the BLO, split from the rest in 2008. The Sinaloa Cartel has since created new alliances with former enemies in the Gulf Cartel and the Familia Michoacana and appears to have negotiated a pact with what remains of the Tijuana Cartel.

The Sinaloa Cartel seems to have taken its cue from Colombia’s Cali Cartel by establishing strong connections to Mexico’s political and economic elite. It has successfully penetrated government and security forces wherever it operates. It often opts for the bribe over the bullet and alliances over fighting, but it is not above organizing its forces to overrun areas that it wants to control by force.

The cartel’s most powerful contacts have traditionally been in the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional – PAN), which, according to some sources, helps account for its growth in the last decade. The PAN’s Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon launched numerous offensives against trafficking organizations, and some major leaders have been captured, including Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, head of the Gulf Cartel, and Benjamin Arellano Félix, head of the Tijuana Cartel. So strong is the perception that the PAN favors the Sinaloa Cartel that Mexican justice officials issued a press release in 2010 denying it, while the Calderon government produced a video in 2011 with the same intention.

Prospects

In recent years, the Sinaloa Cartel has become embroiled in a series of violent turf wars. In 2012, the cartel emerged victorious from a bloody battle with the Juarez Cartel over control of Ciudad Juarez. However, the war with rival cartel the Zetas, who in some regions have allied themselves with the remnants of the BLO, has spread across the country and raged through the states of Sinaloa, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Jalisco, even reaching into Guatemala. The upper hand in the conflict has ebbed and flowed throughout the regions but with the Zetas an increasingly fragmented force, the Sinaloa Cartel seems poised to cement its position as the dominant force in the Mexican underworld. Nevertheless, the cartel continues to face challenges from remnants of several other drug trafficking organizations.

The Sinaloa Cartel may also face internal threats. Now that El Chapo is once again in custody, it remains to be seen whether or not he will turn on his former allies and testify against them in hopes of negotiating a deal for himself.

We encourage readers to copy and distribute our work for non-commercial purposes, provided that it is attributed to InSight Crime in the byline, with a link to the original at both the top and bottom of the article. Check the Creative Commons website for more details of how to share our work, and please send us an email if you use an article.

[…] The Sinaloa Cartel began as a small contraband-smuggling gang in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the late 60’s, which, through the 1970’s, branched out to begin growing their own marijuana and opium as well as becoming traffickers of cocaine for the Medellín Cartel under famed drug-lord, Pablo Escobar. Led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo” (or “Shorty” for those who don’t speak Spanish), the Sinaloa Cartel came to prominence through the 1970’s and 1980’s with such strength and sociopolitical influence, that “El Chapo” might as well have been the true King of Mexico, until his final arrest and extradition to the United States just last year, in 2017. […]

[…] gangs located there, according to the government, some of which make up what’s referred to as the Sinaloa Cartel. (Meza-Flores shouldn’t be confused with another, more famous El Chapo, the NRP alumnus […]

Investigating organized crime is dangerous, expensive and important

About Us

InSight Crime is a foundation
dedicated to the study of the principal threat to national and citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean: Organized Crime. We seek to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime in the Americas by providing the general public with regular reporting, analysis and investigation on the subject and on state efforts to combat it.